Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that in most cases has no
specific etiology. It has been reported in some articles that some relationship may exist between psoriasis and hepatitis C virus. For this reason, this study was done to determine the prevalence of hepatitis C antibody in psoriatic patients in Kerman.

In this study, 132 patients with psoriasis and 149 blood donors or patients without psoriasis as controls were tested for HCV-Ab with using ELISA method and if positive, checked with RIBA method as well.

4 of 132 psoriatic patients (3%) and 3 of 149 controls (2%) were positive for HCV-Ab, confirmed by RIBA method. There was no significant statistical difference between the two groups (P=0.71). Furthermore, in comparison with blood donors population in Kerman with an approximate prevalence of 1% positive HCV-Ab, our data showed no significant statistical difference between psoriatic patients and this group as well(P= 0.39). In psoriatic cases, there is no difference between HCV-Ab positive and HCV-Ab negative patients regarding age ,sex , clinical patterns of psoriasis ,HCV related risk factors and the chronicity of the disease(P>0.05).

According to thisstudy, we didn’t find a significant relationship between psoriasis and HCV in our patients in Kerman.